Including Apple, we've covered six major players in the high end smartphone SoC space: Apple, Intel, NVIDIA, TI, Samsung and Qualcomm. Not all of these six will survive in the long run. We'll see acquisitions, poor execution and architectural inefficiency all contribute to the whittling down of this list. The process will take a while, but in the long run I don't believe the market will be able to support this many players in the SoC space. Today I believe we may have seen the first sign of weakness from one of the players.

Samsung's Galaxy S line of smartphones and the Galaxy Tab both used Samsung's own Hummingbird SoC. At its press conference before Mobile World Congress Samsung announced the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and a new Samsung superphone will both use NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC instead of something of Samsung's own creation.

All isn't lost for the Samsung SoC group as it also announced that the forthcoming Galaxy S 2 will use Samsung's recently announced Orion SoC.

I can't stress how big of a win this is for NVIDIA. To have the mobile arm of one of your competitors use a Tegra 2 in a tablet and phone is huge. While LG was first out the gate, Motorola brought the polish and name NVIDIA needed in a partner. Samsung will likely take that to the next level.

The move also makes sense for Samsung. By going with NVIDIA, Samsung gets access to the reference platform for Honeycomb and will likely get to market sooner than if it had waited.

The Galaxy S II

Samsung also announced the Galaxy S II based on Samsung's own SoC design.

The Galaxy S II has a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display and is only 8.49mm thin. The phone continues the Galaxy S tradition of being incredibly lightweight at 116g.

The Plus part means that the subpxiel layout is exactly like a normal LCD's.http://galaxys2.samsungmobile.com/html/img/feature...That's good, you get the best of two world's (the contrast of (S-)AMOLED and the sharpness of LCD — no more PenTile), but for me to upgrade from my Galaxy S, I really need a higher resolution to boot.

The official specs do not even mention a resolution, and I take that to mean it's still 480x800. Boo.Reply

Samsung is saying they want the tablet to be a Google experience device and that includes Tegra 2,Atmel touch controller and so on.Weather this is because Android 3 is only optimized for Tegra atm or because Samsung is only starting production of it's dual core in March i got no idea.Could even be Google asking everybody to use the same deisgn.Samsung is also known to not be shy about using parts made by others,they use LCD panels made by others in their monitors all the time,in the phone segment they recently announced the Galaxy SL using an OMAP.In the end giving more options to the consumer is good for them too and most likely that's the strategy but they might also have troubles producing enough SoCs for themself because of Apple's very hgih volume (the CDMA phone could add 5-7 mil units/q globaly)Reply

yea, I think its just a manufacture problem for Samy,with 10 million Galaxy sold its not easy to keep up, it seems the best will go for S2 with the TAB a bit cheaper..They see nVidia just as another factoryReply